Turn Left at Venus

by Inez Baranay

  Gail got a job serving in the chemist shop and supplied her friends with amphetamines; later she moved to a farm and was breeding dogs and cats; then she moved back to the Cross and managed an escort agency in the seventies, so around this time; a decade or so later she’d have an agency for secretarial services; then she became a property manager for some hotel apartments.

  Ada and Karen drank a sugar-cane juice at the market after buying some fruit, maybe a sarong. Still a lot of their tribe would not eat or drink from these carts, certain they were perilous.

  ‘But if it’s freshly made here it’s healthy!’ said Karen.

  ‘That’s what I think,’ said Ada.

  ‘If you eat chillies, you don’t get sick.’

  ‘That works for me,’ said Ada.

  ‘Come over,’ said Karen. ‘You OK to walk?’ It was still hot, and very humid with the monsoon approaching.

  ‘I like walking,’ said Ada.

  ‘I do too,’ said Karen, taking every chance to point out their compatibility.

  Karen was staying near the Rumah Sari over on the other side of Ubud; Ada had been there, not often, it was a bit far. Karen had a room in a losmen, one of those family compounds, where a row of rooms had been added for tourists to stay in. Bougainvillea and hibiscus clambered in a riot of carmine, hot pink, purple, over the outside walls. Through a row of banana palms and papaya palms you had a view of the rice fields. Karen also rented another room, a pavilion, for her painting.

  Karen made paintings that responded to these surroundings without being quite literal landscapes, still lives or depictions of the beings here. They showed the intensity of shadows against the bright light here, as other paintings made here had done, but these also noticed other, new things too, pale and distorted children, white-skinned foreigners, a masked figure. They showed Ada something she had almost seen, hadn’t yet quite been able to see, now knew she had seen. They asked you to contemplate, these paintings; they did not mean to disturb you.

  ‘These are wonderful,’ said Ada eventually. Quietly, as if to herself.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Karen the same way, who knew that Ada really saw what she was looking at. Karen painted for her own imaginary reader, who now emerged as Ada.

  Here were the canvases, the brushes and paints that Karen had packed in Adelaide. She’d had teachers in Sydney and in Italy. There was a faint Britishness in the way she spoke Australian English, a background of unstinting support for her talent, her wishes, her freedom to live in Bali and paint for as long as she wanted, an air of knowing things would naturally go as she wished.

  They drank tea together and the sun set in a brief tropical flare gloriously reflected in the water that flooded the padi.

  ‘My house is different from this,’ Ada said in answer to some question and was meant to say, ‘I’ll show you’, but didn’t say it.

  Ada said she had to get home now with all her things from the pasar. But she did agree to meet Karen for dinner at Rumah Sari the following evening.

  Mostly Ada was at her house, mostly she was alone. You left the main road to turn off into a smaller road it was easy to miss and then there was a climb, many stone stairs through a dense green growth. Along the ridge from her house at a little road junction she could get a roundabout mini bus that took her to town on market days and that also was the way you returned if you got a ride on the back of a motorbike.

  On the other side of the stone fence near her house, in the large family compound, a small village really, the work of women was carried out, a labour largely unobserved by the foreigners; the women endlessly wove palm leaves into tiny baskets for rice to offer to the gods, they wound themselves into sarongs and bound tight their waists and wove blossoms into their hair to make their graceful way placing trays of offerings at the shrines and by the gateways at dawn and at dusk, all later to be torn apart by scavenging dogs; hour after hour, day after day the women wove palm baskets, plucked flowers, made rice, the maidens rehearsed their dances and their teachers taught them, the grandmothers dandled toddlers on patient knees.

  Lives so other, lives taking place so close to hers.

  They might have been the same women she had sat with all those long years ago, twenty years ago, when she first came to this island, for a shorter time then. But they weren’t the same ones, this place was similar but not the same place.

  Women were also running some of the new businesses in the area, opening up jewellery and clothing boutiques, guesthouses, warungs that served black rice pudding all day long.

  Ada was under the protection of the adjacent family who owned her house and were beginning to get rich from property deals and the tourism businesses but not as rich as they later would. It wasn’t like when Kevin was there, when travellers were rare, those who stayed and built a house were rare. Kevin had known or known about every foreigner within miles.

  Ada’s house was on a ridge high above the confluence of rivers, the rushing of water over the stones a constant music. Aromas and atmosphere were recalled from that first visit, to Kevin’s house, and yet the two times were different. It was the way it can be when you meet again someone you had known years before and you find that they both are and are not the same person you remembered, and you can place your memory of them alongside the current version and experience the odd sensation of seeing things that are simultaneously exactly the same things and quite different things.

  ‘It was a kind of happiness being there,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘or it was more that it was a relief.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Ah. Melancholy, I suppose.’

  Not actual depression, Ada has come to think, with some help; that was something disabling. But this was more the abiding dominant tone to her sense of being.

  ‘I want to know you better,’ said Karen from Adelaide as they stood side by side looking at Karen’s paintings in her studio pavilion, the day’s heat softening.

  Ah, Karen, she was appealing and she was appealing.

  When Karen said this she took hold of Ada’s hand, causing turbulence in Ada’s chest like a plane hitting a bank of dense cloud, lurching and shuddering, becoming more unbalanced in the desire for equilibrium. Sometimes you met someone and it was rare enough but it was like this.

  Ada went out of there reeling. She got away, that’s how she thought of it later, trying to figure out why she’d run away. She found a motorbike rider to take her back and the sudden tropic dark had risen when she got home.

  Ada couldn’t do anything that night, the next day, that means she couldn’t do any writing. Aroused, wondering, thinking what it would be like with Karen, wanting her to keep saying that she was waiting for her, wanting to know her better, wanting them to make together a story of languorous love in a luscious setting tasting like ripe jackfruit scented like durian.

  Ada was aware that she existed in someone else’s mind now, but could not know who she was in there.

  All right, she would go to Rumah Sari.

  She couldn’t sort out her turbulent feelings about this, know what part of it was clairvoyance, for what reason she was choosing to go there. Let the work she was meant to be doing have a day of rest today, then.

  Karen was already there. At one end of the long table in the garden.

  And that magazine.

  Karen had it in her hand.

  And was talking about it with that couple sitting near her, Canadians. At Rumah Sari you sat at the one long table and talked with everyone around you.

  Rumah Sari was basically a losmen with a few rooms for rent, and in the garden the tables put out for an evening restaurant attracted the longer-stay kind of tourist and those who considered themselves resident. Small lamps were dotted about the lush garden with its frangipani trees and stone apsara, and people in general remarked on being in Paradise. Tourist women on their own were not unknown, and always had a book with them.

  It was too far from home and Ada liked staying at home at night with the rushing water sound rising
from the gorge and the shadowy jungle and the value of intense but anxiety-free boredom and still she came this night, because Karen, but then it seemed because of this magazine, this glossy-covered weekly news magazine that travellers left behind, among the other editions of out-of-date, serially read, torn, stained, rough-travelled copies of this and some other magazines.

  No replies had ever come from Kevin and here was a piece about him in a story about American artists influenced by the East, which is what they called this part of Asia because of the war they had made that now everyone wanted to be over, not only those who were always against it.

  Ada did not want to say as she might have: I knew him, I first came here to visit him, I was younger than all you young ones now.

  ‘What?’ Karen asked her.

  The people around them all looked at the piece: a painter inspired in Thailand, a writer inspired in Indo-Chine, Kevin inspired in Bali.

  Someone claimed some connection with Kevin. Some boy claimed to be studying music here in Bali with someone who had taught Kevin.

  Someone told them to think how it might have been here twenty or more years ago, back in the fifties, back before ‘people’ started coming. Before people started coming. That’s what people said.

  Someone said Kevin’s production of Westernised versions of what he had learned here were a rip-off. No one knew if they agreed or not, and tried out some positions:

  ‘Music is music.’

  ‘But society.’

  ‘Neither “appropriation” nor “hybrid” were in our vocabulary,’ Ada tells Noemi.

  ‘Not yet in yours,’ says Noemi, ‘but I’m trying to see why this little scene disturbed you so much.’

  ‘You made me remember all this.’

  ‘You kept parts of your life separate.’

  ‘And I’ve said that worked for me.’

  Noemi says, ‘I know I do it too but not like you do.’

  ‘And tomorrow you’re going away again, to be your professional self.’

  ‘You know you can always come with me.’

  ‘You know you always tell me so.’

  ‘You might enjoy it.’

  ‘You can’t believe that.’

  ‘I know you’re too sure you won’t.’

  ‘I know I’m old enough to know.’

  Noemi says, ‘That you won’t come and live with me anywhere else, even for one semester?’

  It all gets a bit bad-tempered for a while then.

  Karen said quietly to Ada, ‘So you knew him then.’ Karen knew Ada had been here twenty years before and expected to be told about it. Naturally.

  It was the seventies, you didn’t wait.

  ‘Honestly, I have to go now,’ said Ada, knowing that saying ‘honestly’ tinged an utterance with falsity. Probably Karen said to come and see her, come and meet her, probably was prepared to understand Ada had been disturbed by seeing the magazine, Ada will never remember.

  Usually she could find someone to take her back home afterwards on the back of a motorbike or in an after-hours bemo for private hire. There wasn’t anyone around and though someone would turn up if she waited she didn’t wait. Tonight she walked the whole long way, in a turmoil that impeded any clear thought. The dogs barked and howled but they’d keep away from her. She never minded the lack of electricity in those days, it was part of her romance with the place. She liked not using her flashlight if there were any moonlight, any starlight. There wasn’t any this night, the rains were coming, the skies hung low. She found her battery-operated torch in her bag, clicked its switch, and nothing happened, it had died. The darkness was complete. Monstrous and magickal beings lurked in the darkness, and Ada chanted chants as she followed the paths that led away from the main road and up the steep slopes. It was a long walk. She had done it once before at night, and the family had found out and made her promise not to do it again. There were leyaks in this area, flesh-consuming leyaks at whose reality you should not scoff.

  In this place she had long ago realised that every place, every culture, every community needs its Dark Saga.

  This was her own darkness.

  She didn’t understand it: that’s what darkness was.

  Lidia, Linda, Lara and Liliana had gone away, they were silent now.

  There is always anguish even in the most blessed of lives. Look at what they said about Balinese drama, the eternal struggle, neither finally wins, not good not evil, they struggle into eternity, that makes a kind of balance in life.

  The women of her tribe talked about getting balance in their lives.

  Some had luckier lives than others, and religious ideas tried to make that make sense and of course it doesn’t.

  There’s no paradise or punishment in an afterlife, there is no incarnation as a freshly born human laden with karma.

  Ada had known distraction and doubt but not seriously. That’s what this was now. Those demons, that darkness, something she had to endure, to refuse to be destroyed by.

  She would not have another depression, she would not.

  She had known what it was to wonder whether she loved someone too much or not enough.

  But this felt like one time too many.

  She’d already come to the conclusions she lived by. You never get too intimate with anyone while you’re working. You just don’t. You don’t even want to.

  She already always re-concluded those conclusions.

  Ada lived in a place for as long as it took to write a book and kept her social and personal relations to a minimum, she lived in and with and for the book. Then she moved on, she travelled a while, preparing herself for the next writing period, and for that while was more responsive to invitations and flirtations and flings. Even if the actual flings were rare. She liked the conversation.

  And yet here now there was a woman who seemed, who seemed, who seemed. But it was the woman or the book. That’s it. That’s the conflict, that’s her problem, she saw that now.

  Someone who maybe. But if it went any further, then, goodbye to the writing. Ada knew that much.

  This book that she had waited years to write. Whose time was now.

  For some days Ada shivered and wept. She had a fever. The old woman from the compound said, with the limited vocabulary they shared, that the wind had entered her because she had walked at night; the woman rubbed her with something she mixed up, mud, herbs, and told her to sleep. Ada begged her sleep to send her Lidia, Linda, Lara and Liliana.

  There was nothing for a while but the darkness and the not knowing what dreadful thing she had done. She made her bargain with the darkness.

  The dream came then, they returned, Lidia, Linda, Lara and Liliana trying to explain themselves, trying to understand each other, turning up in each other’s worlds.

  Ada was writing with full strength.

  The day came and the book was finished and the sky went dark with a crash of thunder. Ada would get it xeroxed, send it to Sophie, keep her copy with her until the page proofs arrived. Ada had heard stories of the loss of the single existing copy of a writer’s manuscript, and that was never going to happen to her. She’d go to Europe next, stay in Venice, that felt as if it might be the right place to write a story about dreams that she’d been thinking about. One person’s dreams that became everyone’s reality.

  Ada remained in her house when the rains began. She’d finished the book but waited while torrents flowed fiercely from the sky and down below the river roared and often the whole ravine was obscured by undulant mists, rising and dancing like slender wraiths. The generator didn’t work, she ran out of kerosene. Fireflies dotted the dark spaces around her. Everything in her house felt damp and she had to keep wiping things with cloth and lime juice against the mould. The geckos’ voices croaked and whirred, and the frogs burped their own syncopated symphony. It was a different beauty, some dark mystery sung into being by the extra aliens of the monsoon, the frogs and insects, and those strange musics Ada heard through the thundering rain at 3 a.m. The walking
way of stone became slippery with moss and then the steps were unpassable, the only way to town was by the bus but on the next market day it was raining too hard. She didn’t go to the town the whole time. Most of the tribe would have left.

  A basket of bananas was left at her door.

  Ada listened to the rain and the river and slept twice as much as usual.

  ‘You wouldn’t be here if not for me.’

  Ada sat up in bed. Leyla! Leyla was there! Saying those words to her. In that way, that way that meant more than anyone else could know, meant that we cause each other’s lives, meant we still want to turn to each other, the only other who is seeing what’s around us the same way.

  Leyla wearing a hot-pink leather jacket, crystals dotted in her dark hair her still dark hair.

  ‘It’s so long since I’ve seen you,’ said Ada. At the same time she was struck with the thought, it is still true: I would not have come to Bali the first time if not for Leyla and that time led to this time probably, so it’s true that I wouldn’t be here if not for Leyla.

  Leyla whirled with slow gracefulness about the room, examining its contents, the bamboo and rattan couch in a corner piled with cushions of batik and woven cloth, the set of bamboo shelves, the books curling in the damp air, the small carving of a deer, the little carved bone sticks that Ada used to keep her hair up, the box of typewriter ribbons.

  The ream of typewritten pages on the table.

  Am I dreaming? Ada had not asked herself this so often lately. Now she was not sure how to tell. She didn’t have to wake up.

  ‘Not all that long at all,’ said Leyla. Leyla had very long lacquered fingernails.

  Wasn’t it? But many years now. But there was no way to measure time now.

  Ada said, ‘You saw about Kevin.’

  Ada got out of bed and wrapped a sarong around herself, knotting it at her sternum.

  ‘Kevin is really doing well. I’m glad I introduced him to all this. He appreciated it too.’

  ‘Wow, you see Kevin?’

  ‘I see everyone. If I want to.’

  ‘I can’t even imagine your life now.’

  ‘You never did come over and see.’